Apps

It always annoyed me that when I printed out a web page it came with ads, links to other articles, Facebook “Like” buttons, the list goes on… I always used to copy and paste the entire page into something like Microsoft Word and delete things before printing.

Recently I stumbled onto a neat little solution to this particular annoyance. (more…)

Ever sit down at a coworker’s computer (or a loaner) only to find they don’t have your favorite image editing software installed? Rather than downloading and installing something like The Gimp or Paint.NET you can just point a web browser at Phoenix. Phoenix lets you upload photos to edit online or create new photos. It’s powerful (support for essentials like layers) and it’s easy to use. They even have tutorials to get you started. Best of all its free, there is no install time and it works anywhere you have a web browser and an internet connection.

Apple just released the latest version of Safari. If you want to give it a shot you can grab a copy here. However you can still get at least one of the nifty new features: ”Reader” in your current browser. Reader lets you click a button and convert a webpage from its normal ad and picture filled self to a stripped down version with just the article you want to read. That means you can go from a busy page like lifehacker.com to a nice non-distracting page in just a click.

The trick to doing this is pretty simple. Just head over to: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ they have a created a bookmark that tells your browser just how to do this. Once you have the bookmark you navigate to a page you want to read click the bookmark and enjoy your article distraction free.

This service is one of my favorites. You can do all sorts of stuff with it but I’d like to briefly go over how you can use it to send someone a large file (without completely filling their email inbox). Hit the link for all the gory details. (more…)

You head over to http://jetbytes.com/ click the “Browse” button
Find the file you’d like to transfer and click “Open”
Jetbytes will create a link for you to send to email or IM to the recipient
They click the link and the transfer starts.
Once the transfer is complete you can close the page.

Why is this cool? Suppose you’re trying to send someone a large file as an email attachment, but their email service has a size limit on attachments (a 25 MB limit is not uncommon). This lets you send them a link instead and it won’t eat up all their inbox space. There is unfortunately a downside to this method: you have to leave jetbytes open in your web browser until they have downloaded the file. So it works best when you know they are at their computer.

Edit: Another way to go for online file transfer is DropBox. I’ve breifly posted on how to share files with it here.

If you are like me you’ll have accumulated tons of passwords by now. Some of them are fairly important and you might want them tough to crack, unfortunately you need to actually be able to remember your passwords and the harder they are to crack the harder they are to remember. You might want to store them in your web browser but that isn’t very secure.

One of my new favorite websites is www.ninite.com Why you ask? It’s quite simple: this website makes it very easy to install a pack of up to date software all at once. It is free for personal use. Hit up the link for how the magic works.

Keeping your computer malware/virus free is sort of an arcane art. For example if you install everything on this list and have it automatically run at startup your computer will be slower due to everything loading into memory. Many of these programs have a ‘portable’ or ‘standalone’ version which means you don’t have to install them to use them. Follow the link for all the details.

I’ve been testing out this little program and found it to be quite handy. If you are looking for something to keep track of things you need to get done take a look here over at their website or grab the portable version here. It also works on Mac, Linux and iPhone.
Coolest Feature: It will create a task out of an Outlook email automatically, just drag an email from Outlook and drop it into Task Coach.